OK, sometimes it helps to think about people instead of nations, but, well, sometimes it doesn't. I've thought about the various impacts on various people, and I'm still left with an unanswered question, albeit a more specific one: Are first-world agricultural subsidies bad for the developing world?
To answer that, I think I'm going to have to take apart the notion of a "farmer."
I shouldn't have to remind anyone that not all farms are "family farms;" you know, Maw, Paw, three chickens, a cow, forty acres, and, uh, seven children. There are big farms and small farms. Industrialized farms, and what we might call "developing" farms. Moreover, farm ownership isn't straightforward. There are sharecropped farms, and government-run farms, and farms whose rights are apportioned by village elders or established by lineage. I think the relevant question, here, is what
kinds of farm workers would benefit from an end to first-world agricultural subsidies?
The answer, in the simplest terms, is that, barring corruption, people who work on the most
efficient farms would benefit most. This is a bit of a tautology-- the most efficient farms are the ones that get the greatest yield per acre per dollar/euro/whatever spent, and in farming, as in so many other industries, the biggest cost is labor.
So which is better, a big farm in Somalia with tractors and manure spreaders and self-propelled sprinkler systems and 60 farm hands, or a big farm in Uganda with no machinery at all and 800 workers? If they both produce the same output, the former is likely to provide much better wages, while the latter will provide many more jobs.
If I had to work on a farm... hey, wait. I
don't want to work on a farm! And I'm not alone, either. Farming is lousy work. The hours are long, it's hard physical labor, you smell like manure at the end of the day, and even if you're not too exhausted to wash up and go out, there's nowhere to go, becuase you live and work
on a farm, damn it, and not in a city or town where there's stuff to do after work. People historically have tried to get
away from farm work at the first opportunity. Why do we want third-world people to work on farms? Why on earth should we suppose they'll eventually be any better off than the migrant farm workers we've got in the US, for Pete's sake?
Well, OK, if I had to work on a farm, then I'd rather work on the mechanized farm than a non-mechanized one. But that kills jobs! What are we going to do with all the unemployed former farmhands, when those third-world farms make a profit in the glorious new subsidy-free world market, and use those profits to buy combine harvesters and crop dusters?
And if the third world does modernize its farms, won't that flood the market with cheap agricultural products? Thereby screwing the third-world farmers who
don't buy milking machines? In the free market, wouldn't large-scale mechanized farming win out over mom-n-pop farming?
Well, all that cheap imported third-world-produced food might one day mess things up for the small farmer, but it will be damned good news for all the people who used to work on the plantations, but had to move into the shantytowns surrounding the cities when the owners started buying machinery.
It's all very well and good to point to the transformation of European farming in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, but can you really compare those economies to what we see in the world today? Europe progressed in large part because they were
inventing the new technology as they went, and benefitting from it; in the developing world today, the machines
already exist.
I guess part of what I'm getting at, here, is that I believe the distinction between "agriculture" and "industry" is a poor one. I think a lot of people, especially people on the left in the West, tend to think of Farming in semi-magical terms, as if it's supposed to live up to some gauzy pastoral ideal, and as a consequence, a lot of the conclusions they reach about it are based more on (often outdated) cultural values than on any rational understanding of modern agriculture.
(other examples would include the GM food debate, the "organic food" movement, and perhaps the radical vegan/vegetarian fringe, too)
No, I don't think first world agricultural subsidies are bad for "the third world." I don't have any answers to the pressing quesion of how to turn the "developing" world into the "developing at a more gratifying pace" world, but it looks to me like "end agricultural subsidies" is an empty promise, in that it would likely result in no discernable improvement, and might in fact make things worse.
There are good reasons to oppose subsidies, of course, but I don't think brandishing the plight of the poor, heavily mythologized third-world farmer is one of them.
Update,
10/27: Found an excellent
article about irrational attitudes toward organic and GM crops.
